In Guatemala

I stood atop the Maya pyramid, looking out
across time, tree tops below me.
The image of a high priest, standing
where I stood, holding a beating heart,
made me shudder. How the crowd below
cheered at the sight.

In my mind, I composed what now I write
for that vision of a beating heart I did not know.
It comes to me that it was a young virgin’s heart,
a black haired beauty worthy of understanding,
and of renewal in my lines of poetry.
She may make love now with no crowd to shout

in the high pitched drone of male cicada.